#121 – 24 More Nuggets of Ancestral Wisdom!

Back in episode 117, we gave you 26 nuggets of ancestral wisdom. We’ve got more. Another 24 to be precise. And just because these are in this second episode doesn’t mean they are any less important!

Over the next hour, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with cups of tea in our hands we’ll be channelling our great-grandma wisdom and bringing you some ancestral truths relating to food, creativity, family, health, work and life.

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For US listeners, we recommend Grand Teton Ancient Grains. They sell regenerative, organic flours and berries that can satisfy all your baking needs. Stock up and get free shipping at AncientGrains.com

Resources:

Alison’s original blog post, 50 Things an Ancestral Lifestyle Has Taught Me

Episode 86: Your Stories

Share your stories here

Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

Episode 87: Taking Your Health in Your Own Hands

Episode 56: Preparing Nutrient-Dense Meals From Scratch Every Day

Episode 12: Why I Gave Away My iPhone

Link to supporter extra:

Kitchen Table Chats Podcast Episode 31: Tasting Training with Lizzy Filoramo

Accompanying worksheet

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Good afternoon, Alison. How are you?

Alison:
Yeah, I’m good. Good morning to you, because it’s morning your time, isn’t it? Is it light yet, where you are?

Andrea:
No, it is not.

Alison:
Oh, it’s dark. Okay.

Andrea:
No light. Yeah, but that’s okay.

Alison:
How are you?

Andrea:
It’ll be light for me by the time it’s dark for you. Yeah, exactly. I’m good.

Alison:
Good.

Andrea:
And did you eat before we got together, or are you going to pass out?

Alison:
Yeah, I had some lunch. I just about had some lunch. We’ve had a few technical problems recording this episode, but I’m here and I was saying before, before the internet went dodgy, that I just about managed to have some lunch because we’ve moved house and I’m trying to sort all the admin out. Anyone who’s moved house, who’s listening knows how much admin it comes with. And I was on the phone to our electricity supplier. But then Rob took over the phone call so I could eat, which was kind of him.

Andrea:
Oh, good.

Alison:
Yes, we had leftovers, which we cooked yesterday. Minced beef, so ground beef for you, with the usual kind of celery and onions. And then we had some kale and a bit of sweet potato, all done in the cast iron pan yesterday. And I think we put rosemary and thyme in it and then just heated that up for dinner today and then the end of a sourdough bread which was mostly spelt a little bit of rye which we toasted. I had olive oil on mine and then we had some Brussels sprouts extra, kind of extra greens because the Brussels sprouts have just started coming in here and they are my favourite vegetables so I’m really happy to see all the stalks at the market. So we steamed those had them on the side and yeah it was lovely very very nice and I now have an got to eat them eat.

Andrea:
Them while you can.

Alison:
I have an oat straw tea with me to get me through this episode. How about you? Have you had some breakfast yet this morning?

Andrea:
Yeah. No, no breakfast, but I have tea. And then I had last night for dinner, a very simple dinner where my sister and I, we go to the same church together and all of our families are involved in the music and everything. So we, you know, we spend a long day at church. and then once a month we get together afterwards alternating between her house and mine for lunch, and we decided that this month’s feast was going to be spaghetti sauce and noodles and i had gluten-free ones and we just made a big sauce with pork and we had beef meatballs that you could put on top and all kinds of local veggies and spices and herbs from the garden and whatnot and it just simmered for you know a couple hours and of course it was delicious so, that kind of thing is even better the next day yeah definitely and so we had that for dinner last night yeah it was delicious and was the pork.

Alison:
In it just ground pork like my ground mince beef over here.

Andrea:
Yeah, so we had ground and seasoned a couple different kind of, I don’t know what you want to say, flavors of pork. And some we also put into like casings, like sheep intestines or whatever, and made sausages out of. So I actually had some ground in there, and I also had some sausages that I had boiled and then sliced and put into the sauce. Sauce so it was like really really texturey yeah which was kind of how i like and the meatballs too yeah yum yeah i i know well i said it was a feast so did.

Alison:
You have do you have.

Andrea:
Tea we kind of go all out on sundays do you have tea now i got tea through oh yes i have tea my criminal raw honey and raw cream so not very british of me but.

Alison:
No well no.

Andrea:
Well actually.

Alison:
A listener sent.

Andrea:
Me an email.

Alison:
After you talked about that last time saying well actually it is okay to have cream in English breakfast tea so you’re off the hook.

Andrea:
Oh Really?

Alison:
Yeah, I have to go back.

Andrea:
I’m legal, once again.

Alison:
I have to go back and find that email to find the details of it. But yeah, he was very definite that it’s okay for you to do that. So I’m not allowed to tell you off.

Andrea:
I mean, you can, but I always feel a little bit wrong when I do it, but I’ll be over that now.

Alison:
Good.

Andrea:
I have a review, Alison, for us to read, and it is a five-star review. Leave us a five-star review if you want to hear us read it on the air. They’re really fun to read. So thank you for this review. It is titled Practical Information, and I don’t know who wrote it. We don’t have their name. But they said, I have learned so many practical tips and things from this podcast. It is one I will always follow. I so appreciate their wisdom about food. so those are kind words we appreciate your comment also Alison speaking of moving and all and the computer and Rob standing out in the wind holding an antenna so we can talk or whatever he’s doing right now yeah talk to me about website updates please yeah.

Alison:
Don’t don’t tell.

Andrea:
Anyone that Rob’s outside.

Alison:
In the rain holding holding an aerial up so.

Andrea:
We can record.

Alison:
A podcast today.

Andrea:
So.

Alison:
Yeah, we have some website updates. So, for a while, a couple of the things on our website were offline because the spammers get much better at attacking you. You know, you put something up and then they find some way of getting around it. And it’s just, it’s a nightmare trying to have a website these days. I sound like an old lady, don’t I? But you have to put up so many defences. You know, sometimes you see when you go to a site, you’ve got to say how many pictures have fire hydrants in You know, you’ve got to tick some box to say you’re not a robot. All of these things. So he had some problems with some spam, but…

Alison:
That’s all fixed now. So the stories form, which is on the site, if you go to the menu option, you’ll see an option under there called stories. In episode , we sort of launched this feature, which is where we’re asking for you to send us in stories of ancestral ways of cooking and preparing food. So that form is back up there now. Go listen to episode , if you haven’t, which is where we share some really amazing ancestral pieces of writing and stories that we love. On that form, you can either type something, you can upload a file or you can record. And we’re particularly looking for any recipes you might have in your family with traditional fats, any stories around butchering, around bread making.

Alison:
Fermentation, foraging, grain processing, comfort foods, dairying. If there’s any stories from kind of your family or your friends inside your family network that you think we would be interested in, we’re trying to collate them to be able to store them and keep them for posterity. So that form is back online. Also, we have a listener survey, which again was offline for some time, but that is back now, which has some questions. If you’d like to fill it in and let us know about you and what you’d like to see in the podcast, what you’ve particularly enjoyed, then you again go to the menu and then under the About Us option, there is a listener survey button. If you go to that, that is available for you to fill in and send to us and we will be able to read it. So those are the online updates. Thanks, Sandra.

Andrea:
We’ve gotten some really interesting stories on that form.

Alison:
Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Andrea:
From listeners, which is amazing.

Alison:
And I really, I mean, I feel really strongly about… The stories are there in people’s memories. And give it , , years, how many of them will just have disappeared?

Andrea:
But it can’t.

Alison:
And that’s so sad. And an injustice to the people who spent their lives working on things like that. We should be trying to keep them and make them available for people to learn from and understand from. and reflect on the food system. So, yeah, very, very important, definitely.

Andrea:
As you found with your oat research, not only, I mean, we’re not just talking somebody who spent their whole life, we’re talking a thousand years of tradition or more. It can be lost in one generation. One generation when the story isn’t told and a machine learned how to do a thing, was taught how to do a thing, and then nobody with a body remembered. Yeah, absolutely. And I also noticed from the things that you had, some of the sources you had pulled from in the Oat chapters that I’ve read so far, they were, they’re not, you know, official. When we learn about Shakespeare or something, you’re looking for birth and death certificates or, you know, notes in the church or marriage or whatever. But the food things is always kind of off the cuff side stories or memories or recollections or some lady going around and collecting stories from people and so this is the only way we’re going to get you know this there is archaeological data that comes out of those stories and that sometimes confirms other things we thought we knew or surprises us about cultures and so important to have it.

Alison:
Yeah it’s it’s like a it’s a folk memory you know it’s a it’s an embodied folk memory and once you said like you said once that’s lost from bodily memory from family memory from folk memory then then it’s gone and and the the way I found it for the book so far most of it is like you say reports someone went and interviewed some women and and they saved the tape somewhere or there was a report in a newspaper about something that happened and someone was interviewed. And it’s only through absolutely digging for that stuff. There’s not a science around it. And like you said, if we don’t try and find those and respect those and see those as important, then we just lose them. They’re just gone.

Andrea:
They’re gone. Yeah. So thank you, everyone, for putting those in and talk to your elders and grandparents. And if there’s things you remember them saying or weird tools you saw in their kitchen, let’s hear about it.

Alison:
Yeah, definitely.

Andrea:
Allison, kind of on that note, actually, I was going to say we’ve had a few comments in the past month or so about people who are kind of saying what you and I were saying, which is we can’t tolerate being on social media and Facebook. Yet we still find that we are really enjoying Discord and just doesn’t have that social media feel. So if somebody is thinking that they want to get into that, but they just can’t handle another feed stuffed with ads, don’t worry. This is like those old school forums from back in the day when the Internet was still all HTML. And it’s fun. It’s really fun to chat. And something that…

Alison:
Go on.

Andrea:
Well i’m gonna say something kind of fun that you didn’t know we were doing but you when you got online you saw we were doing and probably surprised you was came out of conversations on discord a couple of us have got your boza course and we just needed the kick in the pants to get together and do it so we decided to well we have a thread for talking about it or a channel or whatever the heck it’s called. And then we all got together on Zoom yesterday and we actually watched some of the videos from your class together. So it’s, yeah, it was really like we watch and then we discuss, we watch and then we discuss. And everybody enjoyed Gabriel’s little recital in the background.

Alison:
Yeah, he’s singing in the background of one of the videos.

Andrea:
Yeah, it’s so cute. It was so cute. And it was just something fun that came out of having the conversations that we realized, okay, we all want to do this thing and we just you know there’s nobody standing next to you that says yeah let’s do it together but there’s something really powerful about the energy of somebody else doing it with you so hannah was literally pouring millet into her pan on camera wow while we were on the call she was like i she’s like i’m so fired up right now she’s already made it once but then And she didn’t do it again. Or she made it a couple times.

Alison:
So she stopped it again.

Andrea:
But she said, I’m starting again. I’m so inspired. So all of us… Feeling like that is a really good thing.

Alison:
So this is the joy of the discord, isn’t it? This is the joy of the discord that, you know, you can, you can take the inspiration and the guidance that I might offer in one of my courses, like the Bosa course, but you’re still, you know, you might not necessarily, like you say, get to doing it because it’s just you and your kitchen. But when you come, And when we come together on our Discord forum as part of our community, it is people all together, people sharing what they’re doing in their kitchen. And it feels like it’s more than just you alone.

Alison:
And going back to what you said at the beginning about, you know, the difference between that and social media, I had Rebecca, who’s one of our supporters, came over from the States and came to visit Rob, Gabriel and I last week. And she was saying, oh, I used to be on Instagram, but, you know, the only social media I do now is the podcast Discord. And it’s got this sense of kind of there’s no need to go anywhere else now because this is a community of people who get what we’re about and who are interested and excited and following the same path that we are and so that whole need for reaching out and finding community because you haven’t got the community there is just fed in such a beautiful way by Discord with like you said no kind of ads, no other things trying to distract you. It’s just you go to the place where you want to talk about sourdough and there’s a board about sourdough. You go to the place about offal and there’s a board on offal or you create a little community like you have done who says, okay, let’s do all this. Let’s do Alison’s course together. And then you actually, you know, getting together on Zoom and doing it together. I think it’s so amazing. I absolutely love it.

Andrea:
And we’re going to do more of your courses, too, just so you know. So we’re all probably going to vote on which one we’ll do next. So we all are enjoying it, though. And just having the—we’ve been kind of jokingly calling it our emotional support kitchen group. And it’s just kind of fun. And so if anybody else wants to hop on, then, you know, we just post the Zoom link before we’re going to get together in the Discord channel. Where we are and so anybody who’s in there is welcome to hop on but you do have to buy the course whichever one we’re doing I’d made that the only rule because you just have to buy the course beforehand because even if we don’t watch it we’re definitely going to talk about it and I don’t want to give away all your all your content yeah so anyone who’s already on discord could just look out.

Alison:
For that but if you’re not on discord.

Andrea:
And you’d like to be.

Alison:
You get the discord membership with the just even with the lowest of our.

Andrea:
Membership levels.

Alison:
So do go to ancestral kitchen podcast forward slash join and have a look and you can you can get involved from there.

Andrea:
Who knows who knows where we’re gonna end up with this also on discord allison i saw so you and lizzie have your own actually your own private channel i i can see it but i don’t think anybody else in there can because you are doing the special mentorship with her and you and her are I don’t even know what you guys are doing but you’re like intense in there the most amazing.

Alison:
Chat so and one of the levels that we have on the podcast community is the mentorship level which gives an opportunity for anyone who wants to take it up to have one-on-one calls with Andrea or I and currently I’m working with one of our lovely supporters Lizzie, who wanted to kind of take me on as a mentor to work through the projects that she has been wanting to do for some time and wasn’t able to quite bring it all together, wanted some more support in it basically. So we’ve been having chats for over six months now and she’s been doing some incredible things in her kitchen and it’s quite, for me, I listen to her talking about these things and I get all excited about them and I think, oh I want to do it, I want to do it as well um but then i have to remember i’m writing a book on oats so i have to go back to that but it’s so it’s it’s really wonderful for her to be able to share what she’s doing with someone who gets it and someone who’s um working through projects you know i’m working through projects myself unable to give her kind of talk we talk about kitchens and we talk about the specifics of you know cooking certain things but we’re also talking about the processes that we’re going through and the kind of procrastination and all of the other things that come with wanting to do things in your life you know wanting to do something um and yeah there’s a private chat for her on discord as well so as well as having those calls we’re having chit chat back and forth quite often on discord that’s.

Andrea:
Nice because it keeps your thoughts flowing in between.

Alison:
Yeah and.

Andrea:
Kind of get builds up to the get together well and i can also see how it’s really helpful because Because Brittany, who I think has gotten all of your courses at this point, she said, I’m watching these courses and I’m realizing everything Allison does, she just researches to the nth degree. This is just amazing. So being able to hear you, even just your banter on things, you’re like, wow, the level of understanding you have is pretty intense. So you can see how it’s really helpful.

Alison:
I’m kind of like this crazy person who just goes into, won’t stop, won’t stop until I’m completely satisfied, which has its ups and downs, really. Okay, let’s go to an ad break. Okay, so let’s dive into today’s episode. Do remember that this is kind of the second episode of two, although they each stand on their own. You don’t have to have listened to episode , which was on a similar theme. But if you do want to, or if you particularly enjoy this episode and you haven’t listened to , go back a few episodes in your feed and find that one and listen to it as well. And what we are talking about is nuggets of ancestral wisdom. And this came from a post that I wrote on my blog to celebrate my th birthday. And we decided that we really wanted to chat about these things and air them and have conversations with supporters afterwards. So in episode , we covered numbers to . And in this episode, we’ve got more nuggets of ancestral wisdom. So, shall I just dive in, Andrea, with number and we’ll start rolling?

Andrea:
I am ready.

Alison:
Yeah. Okay. So, number is rest, rest, rest. And I could have just put another rests after that because I know in my own life, and I know I’m not the only one, that the…

Alison:
Impetus to rest often only comes after collapse. I have to get ill in order to rest, or I have to be really, really exhausted in order to rest. And that’s not the way our ancestors live. Our ancestors worked hard. If you think about hunters and gatherers, they did. They walked long distances and the hunters went out and did really intense exercise, but they also rested. And I remember reading articles saying that hunter gatherers rested far more than we do now. And as women, particularly at stages in our life where we might have lots going on, we’ve got kids, we’ve got family commitments, we’ve got work, we’ve got goals that we want to be at with our health. We’ve got things we want to do in the kitchen. And then on top of that, we’ve got all the admin of life and we’ve got things binging at us and all of this other stuff. We can just forget rest and think it’s not important but it is so so important for our bodies for our psyches for our creativity for our relationships for us to remember who we are and be able to even be in a state where we remember who we are and don’t just go on automatic pilot and have things happening that we don’t want to happen um andrew what do you want to say about rest i.

Andrea:
Agree with this and And it might have even been in a conversation with Brittany when we were saying, there’s a group of us that were all talking about, you know, okay, this health thing, that health thing, and reading this book and that book. And then we came to these brilliant conclusions that if you hydrate and get your minerals and you rest, those things will really make all the difference. And we shared these revelations with our husbands and they’re like, okay, okay.

Andrea:
Yeah duh uh so treat yourself like a human and exactly there’s that with your hunter-gatherer example the appropriate rest at the appropriate time can forestall the future need for healing from the damage of the breakdown that you caused by not resting and in yes in those hunter-gatherer lifestyles they can’t have a full breakdown and say i’m just gonna have to order dinner from somewhere. They can’t have a full breakdown and destroy their thyroid and say, I guess I have to take thyroid medications. Like those things don’t exist. There’s no kind of last ditch effort, if you will. At the point of not recovering, they just die. So you can see the importance there. And for us to take that to heart. You know, instead of saying, well, I have the money, I’ll just spend it, you know, say, well, what if we saved it for a little bit for a rainy day or something in terms of our energy? So I love this one.

Alison:
I think that your phrase, treat yourself like a human, is so, that kind of cuts to the center of me because I think for so long in my life, I just treated myself like a machine. I can just push. I can just do this. I can just do that. I can keep going. I’m invincible. You know, I just do this and do that. It doesn’t matter. I’m fine. I’m not collapsed. but actually we’re humans and we need rest as well as we need time you know with family and we need time creating we need all these things and we and sometimes if you’re in the habit of just not resting at all you actually just need to schedule in rest and I know that sounds counterintuitive but in order to move from one way of being to another it’s it’s important for us to perhaps have bridges if we find it difficult and so saying you know okay on Wednesday afternoon between and ., I’m going to do nothing. Or, you know, I’m going to close down at o’clock every evening and I’m just going to rest. To actually say, I’m going to schedule this in, can help us move from not doing it to doing it.

Andrea:
And it’s a little bit like what every once in a while you and I have encountered in life, Alison, where we have to be really actually tracking what we’re eating. And that isn’t, you know, a count your calories type of a thing, but that’s more of a, I don’t, I need to know what my baseline is and then establish a new habit. And I don’t maybe have the instinct for it. And if we don’t have the instinct for rest or we’ve shut it off and we’ve been told it’s bad and it’s lazy and all the other things that our culture says about rest, then we might need to, like you said, intentionally structure it into the day until it becomes instinctive.

Alison:
Yeah, I want to say one more thing about this because this is just so important that I think in the past I’ve thought, well, if I don’t just carry on and do this, everything’s going to collapse. It’s all going to collapse around me like, you know, my old wife is going to end up eating like beans out of a can or I’m going to have no money and I’m going to be just in a sleeping bag on the street or I’m going to never get this done. And I feel like there’s an important lesson in there, which slowly I’m learning, which is sometimes you just have to let go of it and see what happens. So in the past through getting beyond the idea of not resting, I’ve had to just leave things and let them apparently collapse. And it’s interesting because when you apparently let things collapse and you don’t do them, they really don’t often collapse.

Andrea:
I know, that’s the outrageous thing.

Alison:
I let go of something.

Andrea:
Believe the lie.

Alison:
Within a few weeks, I’ve noticed that Rob’s picked up stuff and he’s doing it. And I had that all on my plate and I thought he couldn’t do it. But no, actually, that’s how Gabriel stepped in and done something. Or, you know what, even if I didn’t do this, it’s still been okay. But without being willing to actually let go and watch and allow it to potentially collapse, we’ll never know. We’ll never find another way. We’ll never be able to get out of this sort of cycle where we can’t rest. So it involves an element of just trusting in a process, really.

Andrea:
Yes and i’ll i will add on to this that a very tangible example because sometimes those are nice to hear which is a couple weeks ago i was.

Andrea:
You know, we’re still closing out all the harvest stuff out here. So it felt like there was all just kinds of little ripe things that were going to rot. And I just had to do so much. And I had to prep all these food things. And I was just in the kitchen. And all of a sudden, I felt kind of like dizzy. And I was like, I’m so tired. I’ve been standing in here for eight hours or whatever. And I just thought, I’m really tired. And I heated a cup of milk. And I whisked in some mushroom cocoa and I sat, I poured it in a mug and I sat down on the couch for about minutes and drank it. And I, I know that that sounds like a pretty normal thing to do, but I was leaving a bunch of tasks that, you know, I didn’t have something boiling on the stove, but like I was walking away from unfinished things. And, and I, I just thought to myself, if I sit down for minutes. Am I so great that the entire world is just going to grind to a halt? And a week from today, we will have no food and be naked and unclothed because I sat down for minutes and drank a cup of milk. No. And you know what, Alison, the world didn’t fall apart. And honestly, I don’t even think anybody could tell I sat down for minutes. So like, And sometimes you just kind of, you know, that little rest was really good for me.

Alison:
I was able to finish. Yeah, minutes is valid. You might want to get to something beyond minutes, obviously. But just because you can’t get an hour doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the minutes. It’s important to take what’s there.

Andrea:
And it was just that telling myself, treat myself like a human. How would a human be treated? Like I wouldn’t put an animal through what I was doing to myself. So anyways.

Alison:
Yeah, we could do a whole episode on that. But I’ve got to move on to number because we’ve only done one so far. We’re really killing this.

Alison:
Following what brings you joy is the way to move forward in your life. You know, before we started recording this, I looked back at that one and I thought, hmm, well, you could just do the things you really don’t like. And you would move forward in a way, probably, because then you’d find out, oh, I really don’t like doing that. And therefore, you’d kind of you’d learn something about yourself and have the opportunity to change. But it wouldn’t be as nice as following what brings you joy right the thing about following what brings you joy is that you you need to kind of have the courage to follow what brings you joy it’s easier to do the thing that you think’s going to kind of work and you can do without the pressure of doing the thing that might go wrong that you really care about if that makes sense you know so doing the thing you really care about is is scarier because it might not work or you might not like it or you might look stupid and then it will really hurt but right I really believe that, going forward and doing those things that bring you joy anyway are what will help you develop as a person it will show you whether you do actually love those things it will teach you what you need to do to bring them forward and it and if there is pain involved in it it’s pain that actually you need to go through in a way in order to be able to bring what you want to to the world you You know, it’s opportunities to learn from.

Alison:
So I feel like, you know, if you’re in a situation where you don’t know how to move forward, just try to be still and think about what brings you joy and choose that each time. And those choices will be beneficial to you. Andrea, do you want to add anything to that?

Andrea:
I’ll just add that a good example I’m thinking of is a friend and one of our podcast supporters, Leah. She loves having good food, but she doesn’t love spending a lot of time cooking in the kitchen. So they eat ancestral, natural, you know, pretty much what her husband hunts and fishes for. But they eat very simply. And she said, I really only do meals that only take me minutes to make because I don’t want to be in the kitchen. Now, that doesn’t mean that they eat poorly. It just means that she doesn’t want to spend all her time, you know, dicing an onion to perfection or something. And that’s her just actively choosing. The thing that brings her joy would be maybe reading on the beach with the kids, not so much in the kitchen. So that’s a way to, you know, she can still accomplish the food and it’s not utilitarian necessarily, but it’s just not her focus.

Alison:
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Okay, number , and I’m going to read at the same time and we’ll talk about them both. , cooking is not a frivolity. Cooking can be an incredibly deep way of connecting to your digestion, your food, the soil, the community, and your family. And number , cooking is an art form, And both of those feel like lessons I’ve had to learn. I kind of just thought, really, until I met Rob, I just thought what I was doing in the kitchen was kind of a bit of a frivolity. You know, it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t, you couldn’t put it up there with any of the other kind of creative art forms that people choose in their life, like music or painting or anything like that.

Alison:
And I’ve learned that that’s just not true. Cooking, whether it’s simple or whether it’s complicated, you know, whether it’s the cooking that Leah’s doing or whether it’s something that you’re preparing for a dinner party with, you know, ingredients, it is an art form. It truly is. And at the same time, it’s something that’s so vital and a wonderful way to connect. And my kitchen and cooking in my kitchen, I’m sure it’s the same for you, Andrea, has just brought me so much connection to my family at the table, seeing them, to my digestion, to the farmers that are giving me that food, to how I feel about food, to my body, to my creativity. It’s just, it’s an amazing thing to choose to do with your time.

Alison:
And I know that from the outside world looking in, cooking is not often viewed like that, you know. And I think that’s a sad thing. I think that we’ve lost something when we treat cooking as a frivolity or something that’s not vital for us.

Andrea:
I would agree with that. And you know that I think that treating cooking as a frivolity is what got us where we are now. You know, it is an option. Oh, somebody else can, you know, make it. We’ll just have boxed ones or whatever. Yeah. That’s what got us in trouble in the first place. And there’s a passage from Against the Machine, which Leah kind of got a bunch of us started reading, and we should probably read in one of the podcast channels. I know Francine would really enjoy this book, and I’ll link it in the show notes below.

Alison:
But okay he.

Andrea:
Talked about a culture where they you know they had an aspect of their culture that they said well we don’t need this anymore they got rid of it you know and then the fallout that happened down the next two generations they started to realize oh no that was something we actually needed and i thought of that when i read your number .

Alison:
Yeah but.

Andrea:
That we just thought oh we don’t need that that’s just for fun we don’t have to cook at home and then oh.

Alison:
Yeah let’s see what happens yeah absolutely okay number the closer you get to your food the more you value it and see the profound impact it has on all areas of your life and the world around you I think anyone on this food journey understands that you know we’ve all moved from one place to another whether it’s a huge distance or just some distance but each time we take a step closer to our food things kind of shift in our brain and in our body and in our awareness and it just has this kind of effect rolling effect that it changes how we feel and therefore how we live.

Andrea:
And you and I have an upcoming episode kind of on that topic, so I won’t expand on it here. But, you know, there’s more coming on this, but I agree very much so.

Alison:
Yeah. Do you want to read number , Andrea?

Andrea:
Sure. Number . All actions have a consequence, even good actions.

Alison:
Should I go on that or do you want to say something about that?

Andrea:
Alison, how dare you? Yes. Expand, please.

Alison:
Yeah, I just, I feel like we, in my life, I’ve often thought I’m doing something good. And because of that, it’s fine. It’s not going to affect anything, you know.

Alison:
But everything we do has a consequence. And I’ll just give you an example because it’s the easiest way of doing it. And, you know, in a health journey, we might think, OK, I’m going to really pay attention to this and I’m going to follow my body and I’m going to read up on it and I’m going to choose to do this action. And then we do something which comes from a really good place. I’m going to start taking this herbal supplement or something because I’ve read that it’s really good and I’ve thought about it for a long time and I’m trying to heal myself. It comes from a good place. but in my experience you know i’ve i’ve gone ahead and tried things that apparently help with health concerns and i’ve not found out till three months later that actually that’s actually having another effect on my body that i wasn’t expecting and i don’t really want and i oh whoops okay so i thought this thing was kind of just going to solve my problem but it’s now created this other problem and I really feel like whether we think it’s a good choice or it’s not we make that choice based on how we feel in our body and you know in our gut at that moment but we have to understand that sometimes even when we make what seems like the right choice it might create consequences that we don’t want and that’s fine it’s nothing to do with us it’s not you know that we’re kind of um you know um.

Alison:
Not determined to get bad things happen to us. It’s just there are consequences to every action that we take. And, you know, it doesn’t mean that we can go ahead and think about what those consequences will be before we take the action. We can’t. We never know. But it’s just to try and hold it a bit more lightly that, you know, even when we make a good action, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen with it. So just try to hold what happens to us in our lives lightly. Does that make sense?

Andrea:
Yeah. And not be in denial when you see the consequence and try to say, but it can’t be because that was good. So why this wouldn’t happen? You just got to be honest with yourself.

Alison:
Yeah. You’ve got a really good example of the next one. So do you want us to read and give us your example?

Andrea:
Okay. , pushing harder is not the answer.

Alison:
Ugh.

Andrea:
Ugh. No. Delete this one, Allison. And this one made me think of when I’ve had four babies now, and every time when I get to the part where you’re pushing, then I’m just like, all right, let’s just get this done with, you know, and move on. And the midwife will say, slow down, slow down. And I remember thinking, with Adelaide in particular, I thought, oh, I’m just going to, like, keep going, like, ram through this. And I remember her saying, you need to slow down for the baby, too. You need to rest. Baby needs to rest. You need oxygen. Baby needs oxygen. And I thought, oh, well, I guess if it’s for the baby that I can rest. But, yeah, but those little breaks and rest where you take your energy and your oxygen goes back up, they help prevent tissue tearing and things like that. They really do provide a more… Successful not you know like a maybe a less damaging pushing experience if you’re able to not just ram through harder.

Alison:
Yeah absolutely I feel like this one is that’s so true kind of in labor and as in life you know we can get frustrated that we just want this thing done whether it’s a baby out or some project finished or something we really want to do done but going back to that rest rest rest where we started pushing is going to affect so many other parts of your psyche and you’re going to be in a very different state if you keep pushing at something as if you approach it with a fresh mind you know a day later and then the actual pushing is going to to do things to us that are detrimental. And I think if we are present enough, we all know when we’re pushing. You know, you can feel when you’re doing something and there’s that resistance inside you. You just don’t want to do it. And sometimes, you know, we might be trying to do something in our life, which is just kind of difficult and we feel icky about it. Like we’re trying to do something outside our comfort zone or we’re emailing someone and we’re thinking, oh, they might not reply and I really want to do this. So there is that feeling of, well, I don’t want to do this because I’m scared.

Alison:
But there’s also a, I don’t want to do this because I’m exhausted, because I’ve done enough. And it’s that pushing harder that we need to try to make ourselves conscious of and give ourselves the opportunity to choose a different way, choose to not do it. Does that make sense?

Andrea:
Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, yes, it does make sense.

Alison:
On that note, let’s go to an outbreak. Okay, number . Do you want to read that one as well, Andrea? Because that’s a really nice one.

Andrea:
Yes, this is a really good one. And I really, really like that you put this one on here. Number , restricting your choices in the kitchen will force you to be more creative.

Alison:
Okay. Tell us a bit about that then, Andrea. What do you feel about that?

Andrea:
Oh, we’ve both been through this.

Alison:
Yes.

Andrea:
What this made me think of was just the idea that more choices don’t produce more creativity, which is actually the opposite of what we’re being told today. There’s, I hear a baby at the top of the stairs. There’s this idea that, you know, if I can do whatever I want and you don’t restrict me in any way whatsoever, then I can really express my full creativity. But that’s actually not true.

Andrea:
And modern art like as an art of the moment you know where there’s like a twisted piece of wire in a park and they say this represents aspiration or something and then you turn around and see the Sistine Chapel and you’re like I don’t know about that and the example that came to my mind specifically was poetry you know if you’ve ever tried to write a sonnet they’re very very specific they have lines there’s a precise way they’re divided depending on which type of sonnet you’re doing there’s a specific rhyming pattern they follow iambic pentameter and then they have that turn at the end you know there has to be a line at the end where you flip and all of the language and ideas that exist out there when you like just pour them into these rules i feel like, They just press outwards, like up against these rules, and they just explode into all these blossoms that never would have happened if you just kind of scattered any words you wanted without any restriction whatsoever into any order that you wanted them. There’s too much choice, just drowns us and overwhelms us.

Alison:
Yeah. We’ve talked about this a bit before. I think we talked about it in the episode when we released the cookbook, something like making nutrient-dense meals every day. So if you haven’t listened to that one, go back and listen to that episode. Because both of us have experienced, you know, when we have the restrictions, i.e. Just seasonal restrictions of food based on, you know, buying things seasonally or, you know, like you at the moment, we’re gluten free. You know, we have less choices, but we both of us become more creative when we’ve got less choices. And I think, you know, the book that I’m writing at the moment, the women who wrote, who made these recipes that are in this book, sometimes the only grain they ever had was oats, you know, but that did not stop them. In fact, that made them more creative because the only grain they had was oats, you know. It’s something that’s just a kind of a universal truth. And like you said, we think the opposite, but we’ve been fooled.

Andrea:
Right.

Alison:
Okay. Number , humans are founts of creativity. You have so much more creativity than you will ever know. Andrea, I think you’ve got some technology thing to say about this one.

Andrea:
I’ve thought, get off of Instagram. Just let your own mind create its own inspo. This is something I remember from the Instagram world most intensely, which is always hashtag inspo. And I’m going to post this for inspo. I’m going to save this for inspo. And you can save and screenshot , things from somebody else. Or you can just get off of Instagram and let your mind start to work on its own. Let your mind start to make its own connections. Let your mind start to see the connections that exist in the materials or the foods or the hungry people in front of you. And let that be your inspiration and it is just astonishing what you come up with and and I many times I think man my life has never been more instagrammable than the day I got off of instagram because it just beautiful things started to happen when I wasn’t always thinking oh the way she did that you know I want to try that I just just did what I wanted and what I saw in front of me. And those were limited choices. You know, I didn’t have what other people have. I didn’t go and get what other people had. I just only had what was here, And that made something beautiful.

Alison:
I think that’s the thing, that you did what you wanted. And when we are surrounded by other things, the news or the magazines or the Instagram or Facebook or just all of this stuff, we just kind of like a ship on the waves being pushed around by what other people want us to think we want or think we need to do. Or think we need to buy, you know, that’s the thing because that’s what these platforms are there for. But the truth is the thing that satisfies us is the thing that we want to do. And truly we don’t know what we want to do unless we close down all the things that other people think we want to do and sit with what’s in front of us in our life, like you’re saying, the people we need to feed, the things in our kitchen, the food we’ve got. From that moment without that interference and it might take time but we can understand what it is actually we want to do what we care about what we value what we want to.

Andrea:
Bring it will.

Alison:
Take time world um but the yeah and you like yeah it will take time you can’t necessarily be off instagram for one day and expect it because you’ve still got all those habit things running around in your mind you need time for those to ebb away and but it will happen and the quieter you can be the more quickly things will start to kind of just present themselves to you and they’ll be far more fulfilling than you trying to copy anyone else um because seriously our creativity just It just goes on and on and on. And, you know, I’ve had lots of people say to me, oh, I’m not really creative. You know, I just have to get a recipe.

Andrea:
Book and follow.

Alison:
The recipes. And I just don’t believe it.

Andrea:
That just devastates me to hear.

Alison:
I just don’t. It’s about not looking at what other people are doing, but instead… Being with yourself and being patient and then this thing will come forward it really will okay.

Andrea:
And for all the all the um charlotte mason moms listening if everybody’s heard about people who started narration with kids who had been in maybe a different method of schooling for a while or started homeschooling whether it’s charlotte mason or not with kids who are in a more industrialized type of school idea and everybody says oh my kids they don’t you know they don’t know how to narrate they don’t know how to say what they heard they don’t know how to look at pictures or listen to music and and that we all know because we’ve all seen it that if you just spend time doing those beautiful things after a while they do learn so that that’s the same with us adults we’ve been stuck in this you know industrialized inspo, cage and we just need to get off of it and learn how to narrate for ourselves.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. , examine any resentment you hold over and over again. And this is one where I’m talking to myself that, you know, these resentments, if we leave them in our bodies do kind of boring damage. I feel like it’s a boring thing, you know, it bores into you, into our psyches and into our bodies our actual tissues ourselves you know and resentment to me feels just such a hard thing to kind of get out and the only way you can is by looking at and saying what what is this why have I got it what’s under this you know I feel bitter about this okay well why do I feel bitter about this where’s it coming from what what is it that brings what situations bring it forward? Why do I feel like this?

Alison:
And through doing that, we can slowly start to understand why we feel resentment and do things, action things in our lives that help us to move us into situations where we’re going to feel less resentful. And that might be by doing something. It might be by having a practice of thinking about something or changing mindset. It might be by taking rest. It might be by going and treating ourselves to something that we want to do in our lives and we haven’t done. But without actually addressing that resentment, it just stays there like a big, heavy thing in our bodies. And that’s really not nice. Do you want to add something to that, Andrea?

Andrea:
Yeah, I would agree. I do agree. And I think there’s a resentment slash almost like PTSD or trauma sometimes for some people that comes up with food choices. If they were, you know, if they experience like food restriction or food insecurity, then when you come into a space where you say we’re going to not eat this or not eat that, that can start to trigger those feelings again. And so just being very aware of it and knowing that maybe somebody else can say, oh, I think I’m going to cut this out of my diet for now and just carry on with their life. If you feel a lot of fear and anxiety and panic over that, just know that you can treat yourself the way you need to be treated differently. You know, it doesn’t have to look like it looked for somebody else on their Instagram. Your path can be maybe slower or more roundabout. but just take that into account.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. Each of these is kind of so many layers because you can apply it to the food, you can apply it to other areas in your life, you can apply it to relationships. There’s all these kind of, because they’re, I think, trues, they apply in so many different areas.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Okay. . If you want to remain active, choose a lifestyle where you have to be active. I think it’s very it can be very challenging for us to stay active particularly you know as we get older and with the ease of not being active in our society and the only way I’ve learned to do that is by choosing the things around me so I have to be active I have to get up I have to go and do things I have to walk I have to you know move my body it’s a bit different for you Andrea because you’re kind of in the middle of nowhere physically whereas I’m in a town and you’ve got a vehicle and I haven’t and you’ve got four kids and I haven’t how do you feel about that one.

Andrea:
Yeah, this is actually, it’s something Gary and I have been talking about a lot lately, which is actually being really far away in some ways can cause us to be less active if we let it. Because like when we lived in town, you know, when you can walk to the library, you can walk to church, you can walk to the farmer’s market, you can walk to the grocery store, you can walk to your friend’s house, you just do. And here we’re two miles from our closest neighbor so yeah we can walk there and we do but it’s certainly not really time reasonable to expect to walk everywhere so, yeah so i i think this is something that would be fun for us to tease out maybe on a ktc sometime and discuss some ideas around because i think it is a really important topic and where you live does play an important role in that I’ve experienced living, you know, like along a beach boardwalk. And so you’re automatically outside every single day on the beach boardwalk. I’ve experienced living in like a neighborhood kind of how you’ve described where, you know, there’s no shoulder of the road, no sidewalk. It’s very dangerous to walk outside with children. And then where I am now, there’s just forest outside. So you can walk, but it’s not really like there’s a task to walk to. So they all came down to choices and what we had to build into our routine. So I think that would be a fun one to discuss more sometime.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah, we should do that.

Andrea:
And maybe get listener thoughts on too.

Alison:
We have really interesting discussions on the KTC chats, which is a kitchen table chat. So it’s our private podcast. So we’ll table that one for a discussion there because I’d like to go into it more. Okay, do you want to read ?

Andrea:
Yeah. Changes you make now will have an impact on you in years’ time.

Alison:
Gosh, okay. And what do you feel about that?

Andrea:
Yeah. I remember specifically saying this actually on Instagram. People would say, why are you doing this or that? I did that for a week and it didn’t do anything for me. And I said, I’m not doing this for now me. I’m doing this for -year-old me.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I remember saying that. But I think of it as a compass. And if you’re on a ship or whatever or walking in the woods, even if you’re one degree off course, by the time you’ve gone miles, that adds up. So those little changes you make now can take you to a completely different place over the course of time and I find that very very important to think about.

Alison:
Yeah I do too and this kind of ties into the last one for me because I feel like you know our choice Rob and I’s choice not to have a car the the walking that I’m choosing to do while making that choice I know So now, you know, being , you know, Rob and I didn’t have a car when we were , you know, , and together. But it feels more important to me now because it feels like every time I go out and walk, I’m doing something which will stand me in better stead for the future. Now, I have a hypermobile body and I have a mum who can barely walk up the end of her road. And those investments of choosing to go out and walk even if it’s raining or I’d much rather get somewhere more quickly feels like I’m doing it for me now but I’m also doing it for future me um but I also but I do think that you know.

Alison:
That statement, you know, changes you make now will have an impact on you in years time shouldn’t be something that we feel, oh, my gosh, I’ve got to go and change all this stuff because otherwise I’m just going to be a mess in years. You know, it has to be a balance. We can’t ruin our life now just in order to be better in years time. But there are moments where we do have a choice and for those few choices, we can make some of them be partially for an investment in the future as well.

Andrea:
Yeah and thinking thinking through your choices and deciding what really is a choice kind of going back up to don’t lie to yourself and what really is necessary and what really isn’t necessary and then making the choices from a place of joy as opposed to feeling panic or urgency is also really important agreed.

Alison:
Okay do you want to do as well.

Andrea:
Yeah, because I love this one. . Having children at home is such a challenging lifestyle, but brings immense benefits. So true. Actually, we can take this both ways. Having children at home, like birthing them at home or keeping them at home. And by this do you are you referring more to like less of them being maybe out in public school or what because even even somebody with their kids in public school is experiencing this too so yeah I wasn’t sure exactly there I.

Alison:
Think you know whatever if you have a kid at home for like three hours a week because you’re co-parenting with someone it has less challenges than having your kids at home, you know, hours a day when you’re awake and even when you’re asleep and they’re ill, you know, you’re up being with them. The more that you give your energy to your children –.

Alison:
The the more challenging it is you know I feel like my lifestyle would be in quotes easier.

Alison:
If Gabriel wasn’t at home um you know and for a while he was at a Steiner school when we were living in Italy and I had more hours in my day which were peaceful and I could get on with things in the kitchen and I could do things and now he’s here all the time yeah and you know for a while Rob and I thought we we just can’t do it because we’re just trying to bring in enough money to survive we can’t have Gabriel at home all the time it just won’t work but working through that and the different choices that were available to us this is the life we chose where we’re homeschooling him now since we’ve moved back to England but the benefits of having him around, are just wonderful you know just having a having little ones with you all the time accompanying you through life is is joyful you know the more time I spend with Gable the more I learn about myself the more I learn about him the more I learn about life the more he teaches me to to let go of my kind of adult ways or the more I learn the way to work with with him you know the way to engage with him and for us to move together, both of us, you know, for us both to move forward together.

Alison:
And it is challenging, but I love having him around, you know. And so if it is possible, which it has been possible for us, then I’m ever so grateful for that.

Andrea:
That’s a good one. And if you only have your kids for part of the week, you still have, obviously, challenges. They’re just different, different shaped sometimes. But a very wise thing I learned from my mom, who had eight kids, homeschooled all of us, and never had a babysitter that I ever experienced, then she said, you can do anything with any number of kids if you don’t hurry. And as soon as you try to rush the kid then it’s all over it’s all over exactly and.

Alison:
That’s hard for someone who just wants to tick off all the tasks on the list.

Andrea:
Oh yeah my kind of habit.

Alison:
You know that’s hard.

Andrea:
Yeah they’ll teach us all right let me read because this this actually nests in very well with what we just said we can do things we never believed possible yeah.

Alison:
We just have to put that one in.

Andrea:
There. I like that.

Alison:
I mean, you just, again and again, that’s been true of my life. I’ve just thought, oh, that’s not possible. And then some of the time I just tried to do it anyway and it’s happened. And, you know, it’s a bit of a cliche, but I think it’s important to remind us of that, that, you know, we all have these limits in our heads that we just think, oh, that’s not possible. That’s not possible. And those are put in there by the experiences we’ve had and the upbringing we’ve had and what people who had their own issues to deal with have told us. But there are again and again and again, there are signs in life that people do things that you just wouldn’t believe they could do. And we just do.

Andrea:
And sometimes we… Well, we sometimes, you know, you said these can be put into our head by things we grew up with, etc. And sometimes they’re just things that we grew up thinking that’s the way the world is. Yeah. And that’s not actually true.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
We just, it’s all we knew.

Alison:
Absolutely.

Andrea:
Or thought we knew.

Alison:
When I grew up and, you know, I was working and I ended up working for Microsoft, I just, I remember thinking over and over and over again, oh, I’m not the sort of person who goes and lives in another country. I’m not the sort of person who could go and you know create something of their own I just I’m the sort of person who does this job and you know settles down and gets on with it and does does well because that’s the only like you were saying that that was what my world was you know and and I had to jump out of it to see that there’s another world over here where you know what I could I could live in Italy for years I am the sort of person who lives in Italy for years because I did it you know i am the sort of person who’s now writing her her own book which i never as a you know a kid growing up the the world the the water that i swam in you know we talk about the fish you know only knowing the water they’re in yeah the world that i swam in was just like well you’re not going to do that are you you know just keep your head down no.

Andrea:
Other people do that.

Alison:
Do what someone else says other people other more creative people do that alison people who who just are more talented or more creative and it’s just it’s a load of rubbish all of it throw it out yeah exactly okay on that note let’s go to an ad break.

Alison:
Okay, so , we’re on the home stretch now. is lean on your past work. Remember challenges you’ve been through and the hard things you’ve done. That is something that sometimes I forget and Rob’s very good at reminding me. When I was planning to birth Gabriel at home and feeling shaky about it because every kind of class, yoga class I went to, they were all kind of ended up in hospital and I was like, is this going to work? And no one I knew had birthed at home and my parents thought I was crazy. And Rob would say to me, just, you’ve been working towards this for years, Alison. You’ve done the hypnobirthing, you’ve done the meditation, you’ve done the breathing, you’ve done the research, you’ve worked with your food. You’ve been working towards this for such a long time. We can lean. You don’t need to stress. We can lean on what we’ve done so far. And I’d kind of just forgotten all about that. You know, I was just like, but everyone else is just no one’s doing this and I don’t know anyone. But we all of us have done things in our lives that have been hard and that have moved us places and it’s easy to forget that so I just would take a moment to remind us to, to lean on on how strong we are and what we’ve done.

Andrea:
Thank goodness for Rob, the voice of reason.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:
And the more you do those things, the more you strengthen that muscle of self-belief or that internal locus of control. And I want to throw out there episode , taking your health in your own hands here. If this is something that’s at all pinging with you like go listen to that one because i’ll put that in the show notes because that episode i just shared it with a friend the other day and she said this is exactly what i needed to hear because she needs to start believing in her own, you know ability to use her brain and and make decisions and whatnot so yeah that’s a really good episode yeah.

Alison:
Do you want to.

Andrea:
Read yeah and do as well yeah okay do you want me to read them back to back, I do. Okay. . When we have clarity of direction and we put in effort, things shift. . Here’s the turn in the sonnet. But % of the time, it’s always slower than we want. You shouldn’t have put that one, Alison.

Alison:
How frustrating as well.

Andrea:
It’s so true.

Alison:
Yes. I agree with this. clarity is the important word in the first one of those it’s important if we want to move that we have clarity on where we’re moving to and because that really is the one thing that helps us move if we are unsure or there’s something that we’re kind of a bit icky about or we’ve got we’re doing it together with someone else and they don’t quite think the same as us then we’re just not going to move forward properly. But with clarity, when you put in effort, when you take the action, things move. But always in my life, it’s always slower than we want it to. Things never just kind of appear. I feel like I had this idea about like five years ago, oh, I’d love to write a book on oats. And here I am five years later, and I haven’t even written a third of it. And it’s just It’s like, really? Does it take this long? Yes, it does. It does take that long.

Andrea:
Well, you could even add on to this that the shift isn’t always linear either.

Alison:
No, sometimes it can just go four.

Andrea:
Five years to get through a third doesn’t mean it will take years to get through the remaining two thirds. You know what I mean?

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes things just shift and you’re like, oh, how did that happen? And usually it’s because we’ve done a lot of work in the past and suddenly something else changes and then we move forward. What were you going to say?

Andrea:
Basically the exact same thing. It’s just that ship with the compasses in my head. And, you know, when you kind of, if you’ve ever watched like a ship leave the dock or something, it’s grinding those paddles or spinning and it’s trying to kind of get its momentum up. But then once it’s out on the open water, it’s cruising.

Alison:
Yeah, it’s going. Exactly. The momentum’s there.

Andrea:
All right. is a good one.

Alison:
calories are not what the world thinks they are don’t believe in calories don’t have them fool you i’ve believed in calories for far too long and they’re a load of rubbish i know it sounds right the science of it sounds right you know with bunsen burners burning things and getting the energy and etc but calories don’t work like calories and you know the more that we go into our bodies and we watch what happens with our weight and our metabolism when we eat different things we understand that um and yeah i just i think calories are just a fallacy i shall move on from that um let’s read in human.

Andrea:
Way of thinking about food.

Alison:
Absolutely yeah absolutely let’s read number let me read this one six do do both of them together yeah.

Andrea:
Okay number there is so much going on outside the bubbles we live in but sometimes it’s best to live in our bubbles oh yeah i really like this one.

Alison:
It’s true um do you have that song in the states called the hokey cokey yes and you’ve got to jump in you’ve got to jump unfortunately do put your left leg in your left leg out in out in out shake it all about and i feel like it’s true sometimes when i step outside these four walls you know either physically or metaphorically i put my foot in something i’m Like, my gosh, does this really go on? I’ve forgotten about that. Is this the way the world is? And sometimes it’s good to have that perspective to realize, you know, that to help you realize why you’re doing what you’re doing and why it’s important to you. But sometimes it’s best just to not put your foot in it at all and just shut the door and go on Discord and talk to someone who believes in what you believe in and to help you move forward and to help you feel good about what you’re doing and to give you that support. So there’s just this kind of game of balancing the bubble inside and out. Do you feel the same, Andrea?

Andrea:
I sure do. And there’s a big amount of the world out there that will constantly remind you, hey, you’re not good enough to listen to your instinct, but if you pay me, I can tell you what to do. And the less you hear all of that chatter, the better it is. And if you’re surrounded by people who say, yeah, I’m very much listening to myself and I’m making different decisions, then you might say, wow, I probably should be reflecting a bit more or thinking about things. And in my notes, I had written, we don’t need to keep up with every, and you wrote any piece of news and information. It’s impossible. And rewinding to earlier in our episode, guess what? If you don’t know who shot who in the what now, the world is going to carry on. Try not reading the news for a couple of days. And guess what? Nobody cares. The world still continues. So, yeah, I think there’s too much.

Alison:
I think that’s exactly, I agree with you exactly there. Let’s leave the bubbles and go on to . Community is so, so important. It’s kind of talking about the bubbles a bit. Support can be the difference between giving up and keeping going. Plus, it enlivens your life. And I mean, when we started this podcast, one of the reasons we started it was because we were in our kitchens doing what we were doing and not really feeling like there was a lot of other people around us doing what we were doing. And having done this, it’s just, wow.

Alison:
There’s a community out there of people who value this and who are doing what we’re doing and who care about the same things. And, you know, that Discord forum that you were talking about at the top of the show is just the example of that, that these women are together talking to each other every day about what they’re doing and what they’re worried about and what they’re planning to do with their kids and what they’re cooking and what they did when they went out and the choices they’re making. And it’s just amazing. You know, Hannah, who…

Alison:
Is on discord and part of the supporter community sent this to me today and I thought I’ll just copy that and I’ll paste it into our notes she said thank you I cannot express enough what this podcast and community means to me in my healing journey and for building a solid foundation for my children and you know we we know what what that’s like being on that journey people who are listening know what that’s like when you’re trying to embark on a healing journey or continue you on a healing journey, or if you’re trying to, you know, put good food on the table and make decisions for children in your life, make decisions for the people you love in your life. It’s hard when you’re alone. So, so hard. And just having community is so vital and it will keep you going and it will give you joy because there are people there who just get it, you know. It’s just It’s like, yeah, they understand. I can talk to these people. So, yeah, I feel very strongly.

Andrea:
And when there’s a somewhere, no, I agree with that. And something that I know a number of us have talked about a bit is being able to be in a space where you don’t have to defend and justify and argue and explain every single thing you’re doing. Because it is, without realizing it, we are so counter to the way a lot of things are done. And so then when you say something casually, then people are just like, what? And then you find yourself having to, you know, give a thesis statement for everything. And then people push back against everything you say. And it’s just tiring sometimes.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Shall I go on to the next one?

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s a good segue to the number .

Alison:
Yeah, okay, . The creative process is incredibly challenging, but the payoff is magnificent. I feel like every creative process that I’ve been involved in in my life, you know, whether it’s a big one, long-term one, like writing a book, or whether it’s a short-term one, just like, you know, what am I going to cook today with what’s inside the door of my fridge? All of them are hard work you know we might not want to do them there are frustrations there’s procrastination there’s choices we have to make it’s scary but the the payoff of seeing that meal that you made out of leftovers or you know that that book on spelt that we have for sale you know all of those breads that I’ve made or the garden that we’ve put our heart and soul into and watch develop over a season. The payoff of that is just, is glorious. Absolutely glorious.

Andrea:
Absolutely.

Alison:
Okay. Do you want to read ? We’re almost there.

Andrea:
Yeah, . This one is good. I think we should not read the last one. We should just leave that one off. I’m just kidding. we have to read the last one okay learning to accept not fight failure is a key to being fulfilled if we can pass this on to our children we have done amazingly, that is so oh that is wonderful and, Our kids get to see lots of failures.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s the way, isn’t it? If you can show your kids those failures and show how you continue despite having a failure, you’re okay afterwards, you know, get up. Then they’re seeing that behavior model, which is by far the strongest way to pass that information on to them.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s true.

Alison:
Okay, so who’s reading then?

Andrea:
Okay, are you ready to tackle this last one?

Alison:
Yeah. Are you going to read it or am I going to read it?

Andrea:
I’m going to let you read this one.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
I don’t want this on my conscience.

Alison:
I’m just kidding. Number . Screens are addictive and change your brain patterns. Amen.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Amen to that. There’s nothing more we can say.

Andrea:
Amen and oh no.

Alison:
Really. do go back and listen to the episode why I gave away my iPhone and there is a brilliant supporter extra if I do so myself where Andrea talks with my husband about using e-ink screens which don’t have a flicker on them, and how we use those for basically all our work, and you know you don’t have to be as extreme as we are But the understanding that literally your brainwave changes because of screens and screens are addictive. Having that knowledge and holding that knowledge whilst we’re interacting with the things that modern life gives us is a freedom, I think.

Andrea:
So some of the things we’ve said so far that play into this for me are, one, not lying to myself and saying, but that’s not really, it doesn’t really affect me. Or I’m not using it in a way that would affect me. Well, that isn’t true. Anytime I’m interacting with a screen, then I am subjecting myself, you know, no flicker, flicker free or not. I’m still participating in something of a culture that can affect the way I think and the way my day flows. And the other thing is not believing the lie that I’m not the kind of person that would get rid of my iPhone or maybe get rid of social media. Or I’m not the kind of person who would change my day structure so that I was only on at certain times or whatever.

Andrea:
We can be that person we can make those choices we we have the freedom as much as anybody else does really and yes knowing that there are people who are working on like you and rob have certain work you do on screens you you have structured something so that you’re less on them and we’ve decided some things to drop you know for instance we could be spending a lot more time on instagram or youtube or something we’ve chosen not to do that but you know especially within our free.

Andrea:
Choice screen time deciding is this something that’s a part of my lifestyle or is it not do i read in bed or do i school the phone is the phone even in my room or did i buy an alarm clock because those are still around in case anyone didn’t know.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Anyway, so that’s a good one, Alison.

Alison:
Oh, okay. Well, we’ve done . If you go back and listen to the other episode, you would have heard great grandma kind of channeling wisdom sentences. Thank you ever so much for having the conversation with me, Andrew. It’s been very enlightening to have you give me your thoughts on all of them and to engage you in discussion. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Andrea:
Thank you for starting the conversation. I think it’s a really good one to be having. and each one of these could be its own complete episode, I think.

Alison:
Yeah, it’s starting to get dark here now. I suppose it’s getting light where you are now.

Andrea:
It is. I can see foggy clouds moving across the tops of the trees on the mountain outside. It’s really beautiful.

Alison:
So you are about to start your day and I’m really kind of about to end my day.

Andrea:
You’re winding down. Yeah. Well, if anybody has, you know, you guys are listening to this and you have further thoughts, You can, of course, drop them in the Discord, engage them in there if you’re in there, or email them to us if there’s things that come to your mind, or if you disagree, or if you have further reflections for them, then we do want to hear that.

Alison:
Yeah, that would be lovely to read. Cool. Okay, well, I shall- Well.

Andrea:
Go enjoy your evening with the boys. You guys are reading tonight?

Alison:
Yeah, we’re still on Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Works. We’ve got about hours left, I think. We’ve been reading it for months it’s just so good so i’m really looking forward to that yeah cool well enjoy thank you have a good day speak to you soon all right bye bye.